Textuality, Culture and Scripture

Wesley A. Kort

Description

A study of the relations between textuality, culture and scripture

“Textuality, Culture and Scripture,” a study of the necessary and close relations between the three concepts, puts forward three main arguments. The first is that Western modernity retained the necessary role of texts and textuality in culture well into the twentieth century, although decreasingly so, until their role was increasingly displaced by materialist assumptions and theories. Taking as its starting point the so-called textual turn in cultural theory, the first argument is for the necessary role of textuality in understandings of culture.

The second argument is that textuaity is necessary in and for cultural, group and personal identities and that the texts of primary importance for identity can be related to what is generally thought of as “scripture.” It moves on to posit “scripture,” so understood, as a necessary category in an adequate textual theory and relates textuality and “scripture” to identity, primarily in terms of the potentials of texts for relating constancy and change to one another. 

The third argument is that the Bible has been and continues to be for so many people their “scripture” because it provides what people, groups and, at times, also cultures need to have as identity or an adequate worldview, especially the relation created by biblical texts between stability or constancy and change or disruption. The book concludes with the proposal that textual locations or identities can be evaluated for whether or not they provide ways by which past and future, tradition and innovation, or constancy and change are related to one another.

Introduction; 1. The Rise of a Materialist Culture; 2. Culture and Textuality; 3. “Scripture” as a Necessary Category in an Adequate Textual Theory; 4. “Scripture” and the Bible; 5. Reading the Bible as “Scripture”; Conclusion; Index.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785271618
• Langue: English

Extrait

Textuality, Culture, and Scripture
Textuality, Culture, and Scripture
A Study in Interrelations
Wesley A. Kort
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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Copyright © Wesley A. Kort 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952776
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-159-5 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-159-8 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
1. The Rise of a “Materialist Culture”
2. Textuality and Culture
3. “Scripture” as a Necessary Category in an Adequate Textual Theory
4. Scripture and the Bible
5. Reading the Bible as Scripture
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Preface
The Bible, even today, holds an unrivaled position of eminence and does so for many reasons. Three come readily to mind. It is the most influential text in the formation and history of Western culture and partially of others, and the culture for which it is central is not confined to religious contexts but includes everyday living. The second reason is that biblical texts constitute a complex, historically and culturally rich, and intriguing collection of ancient material that seems, even to the present day, to be an inexhaustible object of inquiry and lively scholarly debate. The third and most obvious reason is the standing and role of these texts as central for Jewish, Christian, and related religious traditions.
On the face of it, one would think that these three reasons for the Bible’s standing and role, while distinguishable, need not be at odds with one another. The first of the three has the advantage of common agreement. Even if the Bible’s contribution to the formation of Western culture is regarded by some as hindering the advance of cultural, especially scientific, interests, all would have to agree that the Bible is without rival when it comes to texts that have had a culturally formative role. The second and third reasons, however, have sponsored positions that are largely incompatible and even in conflict. One purpose of this book is to propose that the noticeable incompatibility between the second and third reasons is unfortunately exaggerated and can be eased.
The division of two kinds of interests in the Bible, scholarly and religious, is marked by exclusions imposed from both sides. Those who approach the Bible as a complex collection of historically and culturally interesting texts, an approach most related to scholarly, especially historical, pursuits, tend to exclude religious interests taken in them. This discounts the historical and cultural fact that the Bible has been and continues to be for countless people in diverse times and places crucial to their personal, group, and even cultural identities and worldviews. On the other side, religious, theological, and ecclesiastical bases for regarding the Bible highly can hold insufficient regard for historical and critical biblical scholarship. This deprives religiously motivated readings of the Bible of the richness and complexity of the texts seen in their historical and cultural contexts and developments. A basic intention of this book is to argue that these distinguishable and often contrary ways of reading the Bible can be brought into closer relation to one another. That task begins with a more adequate understanding and appreciation of the cultural status of texts and textuality. The gap is aggravated because both sides are affected by the inadequate understanding and appreciation for texts and textuality that has emerged in and from modernity and is now firmly in place.
A second purpose of this book, then, is to address and alter the current and widespread failure adequately to take into account the role and standing of texts and textuality for a viable culture and for the identities and worldviews of persons and groups. While the two approaches to reading the Bible are at odds for many other reasons, overcoming their differences depends first of all on restoring the primacy of texts and textuality in personal, group, and cultural identity, and to relate the textual category of “scripture” to that primacy.
In an earlier book I proposed that everyone has a scripture. This statement raised some question because it was largely misunderstood. A likely reason for the misunderstanding is that the statement could be taken as another instance of a frequently deployed but questionable apology for the study of religion and even for religion itself. This apology, which takes many forms, claims that non- or anti-religious people display, despite themselves, interests and behaviors that can be seen, at least to some degree, as religious. Apologies of this kind broaden the definition of religion so that everyone can be taken to reveal religion-like interests. This means, then, that there is nothing especially unusual about religious people. The misunderstanding of what I said arose from the assumption that “scripture” is and must always be a religious term and that by proposing that everyone has a scripture I was drawing the circle of religion around everybody. Apparently I had not made as clear as I thought I had that I was not using the term only in a religious or theological but also in a cultural and textual way. I assumed that I was doing with the category of “scripture” what is taken as commonplace for a similar term, namely “canon.” A wider use of “canon” does not mean that all who use it, such as faculty in departments of English, are religious. So, too, “scripture” can be a neutral as well as a religious term. Its basic connotation is of writing and, by extension, texts, and it was with that in mind that I deployed the term. If there were a better term for the task than “scripture,” I would use it. Because there is none, I use “scripture” to indicate the place or role of texts in granting persons and groups their cultural locations and identities. When I say that everyone has a scripture, I do not mean that all scriptures are religious and that by having a scripture every person or group is more or less religious. I shall argue that texts and textuality are basic to personal and group identities and people’s understanding of the world and of their places within and to it. I shall make and defend the proposition that texts having this kind of standing for people can be called their “scriptures” and that everybody has them.
Another reason for writing this book is that I view with regret the separation that has occurred in late modernity between religion and the wider culture, a separation that tends to impoverish the culture and to trivialize religion. Regrettably, this separation is not only accepted by many people on both the religious and secular sides of the split but even celebrated by them. While it is important to recognize that, given both the diversity of religious affiliations and the lack of them in modern culture, a separation of religious from nonreligious interests is necessary for the provision of a public arena, but this separation is practical and not a matter of necessity or principle. It is important to understand that the two sides are not, as seems widely to be taken, wholly disconnected. This sense of disconnection is due in large part to the lack on both sides of an adequate regard for the personal and cultural primacy of texts and textuality. I shall argue that texts are primary for all and that all have “scriptures.” However, this is not to say that all are religious. The differences between religious and nonreligious people arise from the differing texts they take as primary.
A final reason for writing this book is the concern I have for the direction of late- or postmodern culture, including academic culture, toward making practical and theoretical materialism prominent and even dominant. My concern arises not only from religious convictions, since religion, although alienated by such a culture and weakened in its potential by that alienation, can survive under those conditions. It also arises from my training in and identification with the humanities, particularly literature and literary theory. One of the principal cultural and academic roles of the humanities, and especially of literary studies, has been, until quite recently, to preserve and promulgate texts and textuality. My concern, then, is related to the course of late modern culture and the effects on academic culture of materialism because an important consequence of materialism is to compromise the primacy of texts and textuality. One of my goals, therefore, is to trace the sources and to anticipate the consequences of what could be called a “materialist culture” and to point out why such a descriptive is oxymoronic.
I approach the category of “scripture” and the questions raised by it, then, not first of all from the religious or theological but from the cultural side. Among precedents for doing so, Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s What Is Scripture? A Comparative Ap